U.S. Helps Iranian Bank Withdraw, Then Seeks To Freeze Funds
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

A state-owned Iranian bank whose assets were frozen late last month by the American government removed about $150,000 from this country earlier this year with legal help from American officials, a lawyer involved in the dispute said yesterday.
Announcing the sanctions at a joint appearance two weeks ago, Secretary of State Rice and Treasury Secretary Paulson cited Bank Melli’s funding for Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs. However, officials also cited the bank’s aid to terrorists.
“The Treasury Department described Bank Melli as a terror-supporting entity and decided to freeze its assets in the United States, which are all long gone because the government allowed them to move them out of the country,” an attorney who represents victims of Iranian-backed terrorism, David Strachman, complained. “My clients are incredulous.”
Mr. Strachman sought to seize the money to pay part of a $251 million judgment an American court awarded to relatives of Americans killed in a triple-suicide-bombing on Jerusalem’s Ben Yehuda street in 1997. The attack was carried out by Hamas operatives whose trainers were schooled by Iranians, the attorney said.
A federal district judge in New York, Denise Cote, ruled against the seizure last year. In April, the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the decision. In both courts, the American government filed briefs backing the position of the bank, which officials are now treating as a pariah.
Mr. Strachman said the bank’s ties to terrorism and Iran’s Revolutionary Guard have been well documented for years. “These activities didn’t just happen since we lost the case in April,” he said. “It’s been going on for at least a decade.”
A fact sheet released by the Treasury Department last month said that, between 2002 and 2006, Bank Melli sent at least $100 million to an Iranian Revolutionary Guard branch that supports Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and other terrorist groups, the Quds Force.
A spokeswoman for the Treasury Department, Candice Pratsch, said the government “participated in the lawsuit to vindicate a correct reading” of American law and sanctions regulations.
“The United States has a significant interest in ensuring that the laws and regulations related to foreign economic sanctions are properly construed by the courts, because this may have a far-reaching impact, not only on how sanctions programs are administered but, more broadly, on the conduct of the foreign relations of the United States,” she said, quoting one of the American government’s filings in the case.